A 'New Generation' of Teacher Unionism

The signs all around us indicate that a new generation of teacher
unionism is emerging. Ongoing changes in the practices of
administrators and teachers suggest a shifting of ideologies and the
coming of a new approach to labor relations, with educational policy as
its center. At issue is the willingness of organized teachers to assume
part of the responsibility for winning increased respect for public
education, improving the effectiveness of schools, and making teaching
a profession.

Administrators and teachers are engaging in labor-relations
practices that would be considered heresies under conventional belief
systems: peer review, differentiation among teachers, standards
setting, problem solving, and self-management. Following years of
party-line solidarity, the memberships of union, management, and
school-board organizations are vigorously debating what constitutes
good labor relations. And, after years of relative quiet, the subject
of teachers' unions is attracting renewed public interest.

Among the heretical practices, we find unionized teachers starting
to take seriously the idea that teachers should evaluate other
teachers. Under conventional ideology, the idea that one member of a
bargaining unit would evaluate another is a traitorous violation of the
"solidarity" norm.

But since 1981, teachers in Toledo, Ohio, have actively engaged in
peer evaluation for new teachers and in an intervention program for
experienced teachers who are not performing adequately. Though this
agreement remains controversial in many quarters, provisions for
similar undertakings have found their way into statute in Ohio, and
peer-review plans are under study by unions and managements as far away
as Lompoc, Calif. In the new thinking, teacher solidarity means
self-policing as well as self-protection.

According to the conventional ideology, responsibility for fixing
school problems belongs to management. Decisions are management's
prerogative; the less involvement with the union, the better,
management believes. Labor accepts this turf division. From its
standpoint, an offer to make decisions is sucker bait, an invitation to
take the heat because management is too weak to make tough decisions.
Besides, decisions are complex and messy, and getting teachers involved
is a tough job that union officials would rather duck.

Now, in 27 school sites represented by the National Education
Association, managers and teachers are engaged in joint planning, goal
setting, and redefinition of teacher roles. In Hammond, Ind., members
of the American Federation of Teachers bargaining unit are involved in
a school-site management plan, and in New York City teachers have
negotiated a contract allowing teachers and site administrators to
waive work-rule restrictions in thecitywide contract in order to
restructure their schools.

In conventional labor ideology, the contract encompasses the
relationship between union and school district. Although teachers'
unions have always engaged in professional development through
publications and workshops for members, their official relationship
with the school district hinges on the union's standing as the
legitimate representative of teacher self-interest through collective
bargaining. While the onset of collective bargaining legitimated
teacher self-interest and signaled the end to the suffering-servant
mentality, the ideology of good-faith bargaining hardened opposition to
teacher participation in educational policy.

However, in the emerging belief system, teachers' unions also have a
right and a responsibility to speak for the public good. In Pittsburgh
and Miami, unions are engaged in practices that "go beyond collective
bargaining" into school improvement. In Petaluma and four other
California districts, the union and management are establishing a new
type of written contract, called a "policy trust agreement," in
addition to their regular relationship.

These changes underscore the importance of ideology to labor
relations and the extent to which change in unionism is driven by
conflict over competing ideas of what unions should do. Labor and
management belief systems have progressed through two distinct
historical and organizational realities: the first centered around
meet-and-confer relationships and the second around good-faith
collective bargaining. My research, along with the evidence of recent
events, suggests that a third generation of labor relations, with
educational policy as its focus, is arriving now.

Because the battles are not simply tugs-of-war about who gets more
or less, but ideological struggles over what is good and proper,
periods of change between labor-relations generations are particularly
tumultuous. The internal tension frequently experienced by national
unions and management organizations are reflected in school districts
as "radicals" of either the left or the right vie for attention and
loyalty with the conventional wisdom. Conflict often becomes public,
and in its settlement new leaders emerge: School-board members lose
elections, superintendents are sacked, and union officers face defeat
at the hands of the members they thought they understood.

It is easy to recall the organizing wars of the 1960's and 1970's as
the ideological emphasis of teacher organization changed from
participation and consultation through various meet-and-confer
mechanisms to self-representation through collective bargaining
resulting in written, enforceable contracts. Pitched battles were
fought within the nea over whether collective bargaining was a
legitimate undertaking for teachers. The old guard said it would
cheapen the profession, and the Young Turks of the nea Urban Project
countered that the current process was a failure. While the aft had no
historic problems with explicit unionism, it had to resolve the battle
between its revolutionary and pragmatic wings.

And in thousands of school districts across the country, teachers
went through the process of acting out the then-radical notion that
they had the right to speak for themselves.

The events we are witnessing now can be seen in this mirror of
history. Representatives of the two national unions debate the wisdom
and meaning of recent contractual changes, such as the Rochester
career-stage plan. The National School Boards Association appoints a
commission to study ways of promoting productive, harmonious
relationships, but does so in language so provocative that the result
is likely to be a clash of wills over unionism itself. U.S. Secretary
of Education William J. Bennett castigates the nea for footdragging on
reform issues, to which the nea replies that Secretary Bennett's idea
isn't what it had in mind. Internally, the nea and the aft consider
radically restructuring. In all these cases, the question being asked
is not whether teachers have the right to an economic interest in their
jobs, but how the energy and commitment of organized teachers can be
brought to bear on problems of school reform.

Although the battle lines have not yet hardened, the struggle for
teacher unionism in the 1990's is taking shape around three important
issues in public education:

How does public education retain popular support?

How can union activity aid school effectiveness?

How can teachers become employed professionals?

As public education's best-financed and organized interest group,
unions play a pivotal role in developing support for public education.
The nea, in particular, is a lobbying nonpareil; its members are
politically active in virtually every Congressional district in the
country. But interest-group representation does not subsume educational
politics. The larger perception that public schools are incapable of
solving their problems breeds reform movements that either attempt
remote control of the schools by close-order certification and testing
or seek to disinvest in them by proposing vouchers and other mechanisms
that would structurally alter the institution of education in the
United States. Unions are hard pressed to come up with credible
alternatives.

The next generation of labor relations also faces the problem of
making schools effective places for learning. This means that labor,
management, and the public must come to terms with a vastly broadened
scope of interaction between organized teachers and their employers.
Part of the compact that surrounds existing collective bargaining is an
assertion that it is possible to cleave between the teachers'
legitimate interests in their salaries and working conditions on the
one hand and the educational policies of the school district on the
other. Elaborate restrictions in the scope of bargaining were supposed
to segregate bargaining from school policy.

Of course, nothing of the kind happened. Even in the most
restrictive scope of bargaining, establishing the wage-and-salary
schedule, transfer policy, and class size for a school district
effectively accounts for the allocation of as much as 90 percent of the
school's operating budget.

Savvy administrators and union leaders recognized this fact and
developed side agreements. Some actually helped one another. But the
explicit involvement of unions in school management, and the
expectation that such involvement was a central role of unions, not a
social service they performed for their members, was not publicly
recognized until recently.

Finally, unions face the problem of redefining teaching as a
profession. The next decade represents a unique opportunity that the
grand hope that a teaching profession can be created will triumph over
the grand illusion that one already exists. This decade's
teaching-reform movement presages the organizational reform movement of
the next. Moreover, it is now recognized that professionals can be
employed for wages. Lawyers and physicians more and more commonly
belong to large firms that face analogous problems in the clash between
professional and bureaucratic authority systems.

For unions, solving the professionalism question means more than
muscling control over state teacher-certification boards or winning a
chair at the table where the national examination will be drafted. It
requires that unions look seriously at the set of policies and
practices that define teaching work within school districts. How is
employed professionalism defined in school sites? What responsibility
are teachers willing to take to define and enforce their own standards?
What relationship does the union have to the behavior of teachers in
the workplace?

The responses of the unions and management to these issues will
significantly influence the shape of teaching in the next decade. As it
is currently emerging, the increased involvement of unions in the
determination of educational policy will place teachers in roles of
greater responsibility: for the public's perception of their status,
for the redefinition of their own work, and for the worth of their
schools.

Charles T. Kerchner is an associate professor of education and
public policy at the Claremont Graduate School. He is coauthor, with
Douglas Mitchell, of The Changing Idea of a Teachers' Union, to be
published this year by the Falmer Press.

Vol. 07, Issue 17, Page 36

Notice: We recently upgraded our comments. (Learn more here.) If you are logged in as a subscriber or registered user and already have a Display Name on edweek.org, you can post comments. If you do not already have a Display Name, please create one here.

Ground Rules for Posting
We encourage lively debate, but please be respectful of others. Profanity and personal attacks are prohibited. By commenting, you are agreeing to abide by our user agreement.
All comments are public.